Description:
The Fifth International Conference on High-Power Particle Beams is organized jointly by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Physics International Company. As in the previous conferences in this series, the program includes the following topics: high-power, electron- and ion-beam acceleration and transport; diode physics; high-power particle beam interaction with plasmas and dense targets; particle beam fusion (inertial confinement); collective ion acceleration; particle beam heating of magnetically confined plasmas; and generation of microwave/free-electron lasers.

Description:
In 1999, Engineering at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory faced competing priorities to meet critical project milestones, insistent pressures to restructure internally to promote long-term technological growth, and immediate demands to reassign employees as major projects terminated and new ones emerged. This drive for change occurred among an unprecedented level of turmoil within the nuclear weapons design and manufacturing community. I believe the technical problems were more demanding this year and the environment within which they were accomplished more challenging, pushing us to accomplish more during greater turbulence than any other time in my tenure here. I am pleased to report that we met many key milestones and achieved numerous technological breakthroughs. In the project support areas, demands presented by our customers shifted significantly over the year. In the lasers area, we continued the detailed designs for the over $1 billion National Ignition Facility (NIF) super laser, paving the way for the procurement of components and structures for what is probably the largest high-tech construction project in the world. This work was undertaken in an environment of significant management and structural changes, with increased reporting requirements from the Department of Energy, starting in the middle of 1999. Despite these changes, our technical progress since 1995 has resulted in a 5000-fold improvement in the performance/cost characteristics of NIF--only a factor of 2 away from where we need to get. In the defense area, we delivered the first production unit of the refurbished W87 weapon, on schedule, for eventual delivery to the Air Force. Also in the defense area, we developed and implemented a new philosophy for conducting underground materials testing using expendable containment vessels. This allowed us to increase our test throughput rate six-fold and simultaneously reduce cost by a commensurate amount. The first two tests were conducted with a 100 percent ...